SDD system cloning

[MobileTechie]

I'm trying to clone a Windows 7 64 bit install to a Samsung 830 SSD. It's harder than I thought!

Anyone have a definitive guide to doing this? The instructions that came with the drive tell you to clone your system drive with Ghost 15 (which is supplied) but this results in BSODs on rebooting to the new drive.

Reading the web it seems that one needs the original install to be running on AHCI not IDE (this is not mentioned in the instructions). Other sites mention aligning the drive with diskpart which would preclude using ghost in the way recommended by the manufacturer as far as I can tell. You'd think Samsung would know the best way?

I'm confused. Anyone know much about this?

 

[johnrobert]

I always use True image for cloning, not a fan of anything Symantec
They bought out Drive image from Power quest which was very good
And made it worse with Ghost.

 

[PCX]

The main cloning utility that we use and that we have found to have the most success is ddrescue.

 

[MobileTechie]

I don't think it's just down to the cloning tool. I've also tried Easeus, Acronis and CloneZilla. None work. This is something to do with the drive being an SSD. The exact same methods work fine with normal drives.

 

[tankman1989]

I think one of the best pieces of software for copying a disk, drive, DVD/CD, etc is DD-rescue. IDK about the windows and mac versions as I have always used a ddrescue boot disk. It does a bit for bit copy and gives an exact replica o the original

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

 

[Martyn]

I'm wondering if there is a problem with the SSD. As far as I am aware you can clone with anything you want.

 

[MobileTechie]

No the SSD is fine. I did have to "unfreeze" it a few times but this was expected. If you google it you'll see lots of people have all sorts of problems cloning to SSDs. I cannot get to the bottom of it but the fact remains that they do. One factor is the partition alignment which is something you don't need to worry about in a mechanical disk. Also seems to depend which controller the SSD uses and so on. I had similar problems with an SSD on an EEEPC which never worked. They are not quite at the point where you can just switch them in for a mech disk and be 100% sure it will work OK.

Anyway I tried for about 8 hours and gave up. I tried everything including disk-to-disk cloning, linux cloning, dd, clonezilla, ghost, acronis, partition manager, image file restoration, messing with adaptive restore, bootrec and bcd shennanigans, Windows 7's own backup/restore which is supposed to sort out allignment problems but that just would not restore to the disk despite it being larger than the original partition. All the files restored just fine but it would not boot, mostly with an 0xc00000050 error

I've installed now Win 7 afresh on it and it works fine. BLAZINGLY fast.

I see there are score of sites with tweak advice but I'm unsure as to which of these actually appy to 3rd generation SSDs. Not all as I understand it but which ones?

 

[Martyn]

I have one to do next week for a client. I put one in an old Acer Aspire I picked up for nothing and reloaded Windows and like you say it is extremely quick.

 

[FoolishTech]

You have to align the partition with diskpart, just like you would when cloning to an ADF drive. here's a quick google result: http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/

 

[MobileTechie]

You have to align the partition with diskpart, just like you would when cloning to an ADF drive. here's a quick google result: http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/

Yeah that's the guide I followed. Still didn't work.

 

[Martyn]

Some of the SSDs come with software to clone and says it is a simple task. I bought mine, and the one I'm using Sunday, from Crucial. They came with no utility.

 

[FoolishTech]

hmm, ok... that blows.